I'm glad I have my family, I love them more than anyone, which is good since there's no one else anyway. Simple things... my brother closed the edge of my flannel in the drawer downstairs earlier while getting silverware but didn't realize it really. I made the slightest scoff-like noise and he said "Sorry! :P" because he knew exactly why. I didn't even think the scoff was audible. I'm depressed. I can't get my own computer working right now, let alone other peoples. I haven't learned any new significant thing in months. I've screwed myself over with my Philo classes and am on the way to doing it with Psych. I have no direction... I'm not getting anywhere in school, just biding my time. I'm not making enough money at work for anything more than my bare necessities even with free food and a place to live with my parents. I can't keep up to date with my field, and I don't have money to fix my car. It's not warm enough for biking still, and I'm out of shape. I have no motivation, I feel tired and braindead. I don't sleep at all anymore for the most part because there's not enough hours in the day somehow, they disappear and I wonder where they went and I try to make up for them by not sleeping but that only make me tired and they disappear faster. My time seems short. I'm almost 21 and I have nothing that seems important beyond my family, who are again, the most important thing in my life. My mom keeps telling me I should go places... Scotland, Texas, Arizona, europe, Washington, etc. Almost every day this week. My parents both tell me to do the things I want now before I'm too old to do them and have more worries and commitments but I don't think I have the money or reasons to bother with it. I want the world on a string or at least my own special part of it but neither seems attainable. I want to know more than I do now, about computers, about people, about the world in general. Lately everyone I talk to seems shallow and hollow, like they're making up a story to keep me entertained for their own enjoyment which is making me increasingly paranoid and mistrustful. I talked to Chenin a bit earlier about this because she messaged me when i was pissing and moaning on IRC. I thought about it, and I don't really trust anyone or have any real friends. My "best friend" in the physical world reaslly knows nothing about me, and probably doesn't care. I haven't talked to him since last Fall probably and that was just a hello in passing at the high school's homecoming football game. I used to trust people online... my friend Ashley and my friend Nikki. That was years ago though. I trusted them more than anyone in the physical world during the times we were close. My entire family visited Ashley's family over spring break one year and we spent a day touring San Antonio, TX with her and her mom who was a history teacher. It was a blast. Over the years since we've grown apart though and I only talk to her *maybe* once a month on AIM for 15 minutes. Nikki was after that, we only talked online for 6 months I think before we decided to meet. Labor day weekend one year I drove down to Georgia with my dad. We left Friday afternoon, went all night, and got there at 7AM Sat. morning. Dad disappeared and spent time with her parents and doing his own thing. Me and Nikki tooled around and did all sorts of stuff. Since then we've grown apart too. The summer she was in Governor's Honors program was awesome. She made me thinsg and sent me poetry, we wrote letters back and forth, i called her and gave her money for phone cards. She made me the awesomeest friendship bracelet which I cherished. The only girlfriend I ever had had gotten me this ridicukous giant ggold0plated chain bracelet for x-mas that I hated and totally didn't suit me. This though, this was a piece of string that meant the world to me and was natural, it was the only accessory I wore and I never took it off. I super-glued it when it frayed, and when it finally broke, I was sad. She told me to send it to her and she'd use it as a guide to make a new one. I sent it. She never made a new one. I really wish I had someone I could trust completely now, and ideally someone who wouldn't later grow apart or crush me. I hope I never did that to them. Growing apart is natural though so there's little to be done about it. I really feel like I could abandon IRC, ICQ, and AIM entirely and it wouldn't make any difference. Sure, people can say they'll miss me, but I don't really believe it or at least I don't think it'd go beyond "I wonder where he went." Since I'm wallowing in my own pity and misery, I can say I want someone to *really* miss me, to be so forlorn they search for years to find me again if that's what it takes, they'd be miserable any other way. But that's stupid and I'd never want someone to feel bad because of me. I could probably delete all but 5 of the 500+ people on my ICQ list and all but 5 or so of my 160 on AIM and it wouldn't change anything... I look at my lists and see a bunch of people I know of, but don't really know and vice versa. People who i might talk to one day but who I can't turn to when I really need to talk. I alt+tab between AIM, ICQ, and IRC repeatedly, sometimes 10 or more times consecutively to look over the names, searching but not finding what I'm looking for... then I turn to random chat hoping to hit that lucky random one, or else search matchmaker sites looking for that one person. It's patheitc and is where most of my time goes. It never gets my anywhere, and then the sun comes up and I stumble to work or class half-dead. If I wanted to be lame I could tie this into The Matrix and Neo's search. Too late, I did. Blah, this is too long as it is and most likely no one will really read it, and if they do, they'll either not care or feel awkward and not know how to respond and so they won't. Or else offer simple apologies for things they haven't done wrong or for the world in general and offer little well wishes that although appreciated, don't help in the slightest. Bitter, depressed, jaded, tired, paranoid, lonely, miserable, searching.

you made a list of all these sad painful things about yourself... now make alist of all the kick ass things about you... you need balance. for every shitty thought you have about yourself, force yourself to find a good one... instead of thinking of all the people who dont love or understand you, focus on strengthening the bonds with the people who do...

and then add me to your icq :)

xoxo best of luck, sweetness... some people never find what theyre looking for, some people dont even know to start looking...

I spent the last three years of high school in almost that exact same position. A few bad things happened, that weren't really my fault, but they effectively turned me into a completely antisocial, uncaring, even more cynical, boring person. I wasn't mean, I wasn't a bad guy, I just had no desire to be friendly. I was either at school, work, or on the computer screwing around on the internet. I almost never had friends over, or went to someone else's house, didn't have anything remotely close to a girlfriend, and I didn't care. I was constantly bored out of my mind, but not motivated to do a damn thing about it.

So after I graduated I went to college a good 21 hour drive from home. That turned out to be the best thing I've ever done. I guess I was sort of getting myself out of my 3 year funk anyways, but the change of environment was really a catalyst. When I think about it, the only thing I left behind that I cared about was my family. And getting away from them on a daily basis freed me from a lot of stress that I didn't even realize was there.

I had the good fortune to live across the hall in a dorm from two people that quickly became the two best friends I've ever had, and I sort of forced myself to get involved with things that I never would've done in high school. Things that noone would ever have in a million years imagined me doing. My mom refused to believe that I had become the mascot for a Division 1-A college until she came down and saw it for herself. And a lot of other things. I tried lots of stuff, some of it I enjoyed, some of it I hated. So I found some stuff that was fun, and I'm a lot happier because of it.

The ever so elusive point is this. After three years of constant depression, I've come to the conclusion that depression tends to be ones own fault. Barring the occasional crappy uncontrollable individual tradgedy or whatever, you tend to be as happy as you want to be. In high school I felt perfectly content being miserable and feeling sorry for myself. It wasn't fun, and I wouldn't recommend it, but at the time, I was content with it.

Moving away was easily the best thing I've done in my recent life. Living on my own sort of forced me out of my lazy depression, the alternative being starving to death or something. I chose an enviroment full of people, mostly the sort of people that I never would've previously considered spending time with, and I found out that a lot of them aren't so bad. I don't think college or the move or whatever has changed me or my personality that much. I didn't become some wild, wreckless thing like a lot of people do when they gain the freedoms that college often offers. The whole experience has just sort of made me realize how depressed I was, and how easy it actually was to get out of it once I tried. It's not the sort of thing you can think or reason yourself out of. In all honesty, it's the sort of problem that if you can occupy yourself enough to not think about it, it will just go away.

I hope this all makes sense. I don't know too terribly much about the specifics of your life or mindset, but my suggestion would be to listen to the others that are telling you to go somewhere else, and do something different. Don't worry too much about money, find a way to make it happen and worry about financial stuff later. And definately don't worry about reasons. One thing I know for sure, it's incredibly easy to find reasons to not do something. I found a million reasons to not do everything that came up in highschool. Do some things just for the sake of doing things, and eventually you'll find a few things that you enjoy. And then you find other people doing those things that you enjoy, and that's where the friends come from. At least, that's how it's worked for me.

If this is terribly incoherent or confusing, let me know. Good luck with it all.